If we loved construction sites as well as we do ruins, we landscape architects would probably have made more places better for more people.

I was reading a journal article today that characterised our profession as ‘comfortably situated in a world of capital-driven practice through colonial lenses’ … ‘producing spaces that serve a privileged few’. The article, published by Routledge in Landscape Research, continues in this careful and measured tone to humbly call for ‘the death of landscape architecture.’

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Serious people aren’t as free to paint the profession as a grotesque caricature ‘controlled in scope, scale, and values by capital and clients.’
Andrew Saniga, for example, discussing Ellis Stones and the founding of the profession of landscape architecture in Australia, deploys nuance when he elucidates:

‘To Stones, and others he inspired (in the burgeoning environmental movement of the 1960s), the most important way forward in conservation was to develop a degree of professional clout that could stand in opposition to those who held power, largely the engineers and planners and other entrenched bureaucracies.’

What our hyperventilating (‘we argue [for] the death of landscape architecture’) contributors to Landscape Research miss is that before the professionalisation of landscape architecture there was literally no one reliably in the proverbial room arguing for the retention of trees, the protection and restoration of biodiversity, the value of canopy cover, for WSUD integration, etc, - these things matter and their absence made shared public space measurably worse.

People serious about making change know that wistful daydreams gesturing vaguely toward agrarian utopias will not be as effective as elbowing into the rooms where decisions are made and learning to speak compellingly in the language of the decision makers.
If you’re serious about making change: show it by making yourself vulnerable, vulnerable in the serious sense, vulnerable to the inevitable critique rightly levelled against those complicit in the exercise of power.

According to this article I read this morning, our profession ‘remains driven by capital, power, Western frameworks, and design exceptionalism’, it ‘draws on [a] history largely blind to injustice, patriarchy, colonialism, disenfranchisement, and violence.’

I work in the profession, I just finished a project providing a new nature play and gathering space to a school on Melbourne’s suburban fringe. This school’s catchment is host to large recent refugee and migrant communities and dozens of languages are spoken by its families.
To say that building a new gathering and play space for this school is ‘producing spaces that serve a privileged few’ (note the authors make no qualification) is dispiriting in the extreme to this prospective PhD student because it highlights so firmly how truly tenuous the academy’s relationship to the quiet, technical work of day-to-day landscape architecture can become.

The authors are of course correct when they make the piercing observations that we do in fact live in a world in which there is ‘power’, in which ‘capital’ plays a part in the shaping of the built environment. But it’s my profession knowledge of the ‘western framework’ of the Victorian Government School System that allows me to do my job, engaging knowledgeably in that system to ensure recent migrant kids are welcomed to school by a modest but beautiful new playground.

The writers of our article in Landscape Research have no doubt made change in the world: I’m sure they’ve elicited a few nodding heads and a few rolling eyes among academic staff and students whose universities have paid for access to their work. My exercising of the technical knowledge and institutional clout afforded our profession has also made change in the world: little kids come to school in a new country, they play and learn in a beautiful new playground, and they feel a sense of pride in the institutions that nurture them and which they know intuitively represent the community’s investment in them.

I know it’s one of the landscape architect’s great fantasies to be sitting among the rubble and ruins sneering ‘I told you so’, but some landscape architects are in fact serious people and serious people know that it’s harder to build things up than it is to tear them down.